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Me, I have not even looked at Maurice, or Dragomir, or the Mighty Compadre. I have been somewhat distracted by other issues but I am slowly emerging from that and I hope to start detecting again soon.

We’ve had a few nice days this Winter but alas, I couldn’t make it out.

This year I am really aiming at buying a new detector. I have spoken about it before and no, I am not abandoning the XP Deus. I have been searching for a detector for a very specific type of hunting. I thought I had it with the Blisstool but although the machine delivers what it promises, I never used it enough last year to really extract the benefits. Meanwhile, a new Russian machine has come into play and just recently, a dealer in the U.S. began carrying it. It’s an advanced machine and this is reflected in the price. With a wife and two young ones, I have to maneuver financially to come up with the money. My plan is to work the Deus hard to raise the funds.

Anyway, if you see me out there disturbing the soil, feel free to stop by and say hi.

I returned to the spot where I found the gold button from the Royal Army Pay Corps and although I did not find gold again, I did find this curious medal, about the size of a U.S. dime:

Unfortunately, I broke it into three pieces when I dug it up and I misplaced the third piece but you can see most of the medal. It says: “Queen Elizabeth The Second” and it includes a profile of the queen.

Something brought subjects of the Crown to my beloved city and during their sojourn they dropped some items for me to find later. Now I am really curious as to what else is under that dirt.

I’ll say this again; people who don’t metal detect will never encounter these mysteries and their lives will be duller.

A long time ago, I foolishly declared that I would find silver coins in every old park in our fair city. By sheer luck, I’ve managed to do that at almost every old park except for one; Henry park.

I got the information about Henry park’s founding from a city web page that no longer exists. If I recall, the park opened in 1886; a neighborhood park the size of a city block. Today, the park is a flat piece of land with no trees in it. The oldest trees on its periphery, could be from the 1940’s. Only recently, the city put some modern play equipment on one of its corners.

I hunted this park once or twice in the last five years and didn’t find any silver coins. Today, I wanted to give it another shot and took my XP Deus metal detector and two hours in an incredibly beautiful day. For the first hour and half, the park behaved exactly as before. I found nothing but aluminum foil and a few pieces of rusted wire (there are lots of wire at this park for some reason). However, towards the end of my hunt, the park began to act its age. At about 6 inches down I found a 1942 War nickel. A few minutes later I pulled the bottom of a shotgun shell known around these parts as a head stamp. Last came a small silver earring.

Henry park November 23 2016

I see that I need to spend more time at this park. It is incredibly trashy for not having any amenities and for not being used very much. I also suspect that sometime after the Second World War, this park was filled and graded, putting the coins from the turn of the century out of reach. I could be wrong. I aim to find out.

I hunted a site that has been active in our city’s history since its very beginnings. The school sitting there is the modern version of the school that was there in the 1870’s. Unfortunately, the dirt at this site has been moved countless times as other structures were built and torn down and at least one railway crossed it. Still, I was hopeful a coin or two may have been left unmolested in the ground.

After almost an hour of digging bits of zinc and old brass, I managed to dig a 1940 wheat cent, then my lunch hour was over. On my way back to the car I could see the thousands of square inches I did not ran my coil over, each with the potential of having a coin under it.

I have mentioned this before. If you think of the site you are working as a collection of square inches, then, maybe, you will be more careful about exploring each and every one of those square inches. I am just saying.

Again, I didn’t take a picture of my wheat; you know what a wheat looks like. I am really enjoying my metal detecting these days. I hope you all are too.

For lunch today, I returned to the Iron Pit. The Iron Pit is a segment of river bank where, a few years back, I found a number of wheats and other old bits just laying on the surface. Eventually the Iron Pit yielded silver and gold and many other cool things. One of the funnest things about the Iron Pit, was finding a relatively large number of small silver pieces; charms, small rings, bits of earrings; that sort of thing.

Along with all that, I found a number of small transportation tokens from the early days of Wichita. I suspect, although I never was able to corroborate this, that this spot was a stop in the InterUrban rail system that existed in my city before the 1940’s. This would explain the amount of coinage and tokens and the bits of silver jewelry (plus two gold rings). This would also explain the high concentration of iron there.

Since I am back to gold hunting, I decided to return to see if the rains of the past couple of years had washed up something I missed. I didn’t take a picture but today i found a number of bits of foil and two non-ferrous targets: a 1928 wheat cent and a brass ring, not the jewelry kind, more like it belonged to some machine. Both items gave nice signals and neither was deeper than five inches.

For lunch today I took Maurice, my XP Deus metal detector, to a section of river bank where I found a number of rings a few years back. My intention was to dig all mid-tones. A good number of pulltabs are no longer buried there and this:

Not too shaby. I plan on returning and finish cleaning the area of all foil and pulltabs.

Regardless of the heat, at lunch time today, I went to the place where I’ve found a number of old coins in the recent past. Saturday morning I took my Tesoro Compadre and cleaned a bunch of trash from the first 5-6 inches of soil. The spot is a bear in terms of iron. But it wasn’t the iron I was after, I was after all the freaking aluminum foil. As it happened, I removed a bunch of iron that was near the surface as well.

So today I took my time and decided to dig only the choosiest of signals. I was fooled a couple of times with rusted nails and I even got fooled a few times with small aluminum foil that I missed with the Compadre. By the way, I decided to take the XP Deus on this hunt. Towards the very end of my lunch hour I got a nice signal among iron. Nice and repeatable. After I dug up my obligatory 9 inch hole I stuck my pinpointer in and got an iffy bing at the bottom of the hole. This always makes me smile because that means the object is deep. Incidentally, in an effort to avoid holes-to-nowhere, I dusted off my DetectorPro Pulse Induction pinpointer. It has a reach of about 4 inches for a quarter size coin and a solid 3 inches for a dime sized coin so if I miss my pinpointing with the Deus, I can still find the target in the hole.

This particular target was about 2 inches deeper. I know, I ought to quit talking about depth. It means nothing to anyone else but me. Be that as it may, I pulled this nice 1905 Indian Head cent out of the dirt:

This IH was dropped shortly after it was minted. You can see part of the word Liberty on the headdress and the reverse has nice details on it.

And now comes a bit of ranting

Here is the list of all coins found at this relatively small spot at this park: I’d say is about 15ft x 15ft. You can see the pictures of these coins in the last 10 or so posts:
1919 Wheat
1918 Wheat
1915 Wheat
18xx V nickel
189X V nickel
1890 Indian
1905 Indian
1917 Type 1 Standing Liberty
1894 Barber quarter
1901 Barber dime
1912 Barber dime
1904 Barber dime
KS Tax Token

This list does not include the coins found by Redd and KSDave three years ago, many from this very same spot, one of which was a Seated dime.
Also, keep in mind that this park has been hunted a quadrillion times by a thousand detectorists since the hobby came about.

My point is that our old parks are choke-full of old coins but these coins are not easily accessible. You most definitely will NOT find these coins if you:
Swing too high
Swing too fast
Lift the coil at the ends of your swing
Listen poorly to the tones
Use a detector not built for these environs
Use a detector you do not know well
Do not learn from the trash you dig

I am not trying to be an ass. Really. I am just saying those of us who came into the hobby in the last 10 years have a different reality to contend with. Unless you are only hunting private properties (lucky you), you need to approach our city parks with a fresh set of expectations, philosophy, and equipment.

*** Before you read this post, read this post about the time Dick Stout spoke to Congress about our hobby. Plus, check out the eye candy. No, I am not talking about the pictures of Stout.***
I decided it was time. No more pussyfooting around. It was time to dig deeply and carry a big coil.

I am not, generally speaking, a fan of large coils. As a coin shooter, I have never found a use for them. An 11 inch coil has been the limit for me. However, with my recent acquisition of the Blisstool V3, I became the proud owner of a 15 inch coil. This thing looks comical and to quote my fellow hunter Steve Ukena, it looks as if I am compensatin’.

Yet, there is a spot at a local old park. I hunted it once or twice with no good results. This spot is a sea of bottle caps. It is interesting how some areas of our city parks will get a certain personality. Sometimes it is pull tabs, sometimes it is bottle caps, and sometimes it is both.

So I drive by this particular area and think about the next time I will hit it. You see, this area has always been open. Since the very beginning of our city’s history. It never had any structures. I know, as I have been told by someone in their 80’s, that after swimming in the river or in the municipal swimming pool that stood nearby, people would sit in this very spot and have pick nicks. I can see how this may have happened all the way back to the late 1800’s.

There is evidence that this spot has been covered with silt from the river during the many pre-1960 floods that occurred here. There is a layer of clay on top of what I surmise to be the original sand.

This has led me to believe, that the very old coins and stuff are buried deep under the silt and the bottle caps. I spent some time with the Deus and the Bliss with the 11 inch coil but I am not penetrating deep enough; thus my decision to apply the 15 inch coil to the dirt here. I did the first excursion yesterday at lunch.

I was happy with the coil’s pinpointing ability. The Blisstool doesn’t have an all metal pinpointing feature. You pinpoint the old fashion way. I like to use the front of the coil
and use the wiggle method. I tested this yesterday and was able to pinpoint relatively shallow targets with precision. Of course, I had to work spots from every direction because of the coils large footprint but this does not represent a hindrance to me. I worked to empty a large enough area to be able to manually ground balance the Bliss but although I dug 5 pieces of trash from a 2×2 area, more trash was revealed that was previously masked. Such is the ground I hunt.

Last I want to mention a phenomenon that I will call the “Now you don’t see it, now you do” syndrome. I have experienced it several times in the last 5 years. I select an area somewhere that’s utterly hopeless. I stick to it and after a number of excruciatingly painful hunts I cross a certain threshold and voila! keepers! It goes beyond removing trash; I believe it has to do with my brain getting to know the particulars of the dirt, almost as if a psychic connection is made between the site and me; as if the ghosts of the past finally break through the mist and whisper in my ear…
Laugh all you want, but I believe this is why I consistently pull silver out of certain parks where others don’t.

Anyway, it’s getting hot out there. The dirt is beginning to harden and time’s awastin’. Time to dig!

I went out this morning to Linwood park where I’ve been finding old coins for a while now. I left the Bliss home and took the Deus instead. I just wanted to hunt and not worry about the new detector.

The very first signal was a nice 1904 Barber with no mint mark. Then I dug a bunch of deep trash. Last I got a crackling more than a signal. The only reason I dug it is because the all metal mode told me there was a definite object down there. The target was a 2 mil Kansas tax token.

I really like my Deus. I know it. I know what it’s telling me. I just wish I could find deeper coins. 9 inches seems to be the limit for dimes. It can go deeper on larger coins of course but dimes are so much more common.

At any rate, I found that dime in the same 5×5 area around this young tree where I’ve found a number of old coins before. As you can see, there is no lack of trash. All that trash with the exception of the bottle cap was deep.

More rain is in the forecast so I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to detect.

The key to finding old coins is to go to a place that has them. Really.

I returned to the old coin park. I hunted in the same general area and the very first deep target was my first and only Indian cent of the year.

A couple of pieces of deep rusted iron later, I hit upon this key

I have found a few of this very same kind of key before at other old parks. This company must have been a very popular place to buy keys back in the day. I am not sure how old this key may be; I am thinking maybe 30’s.

Anyway, the rest of the hunt produced only rusted iron and a number of very small pieces of aluminum foil from picnics of days of old.

I tell you, I am not afraid of telling the world about this since I know the kind of discipline and focus that it takes to hunt deep whispers. As long as I continue to pull the occasional old coin from my excavations I will continue.

By the way, if you do decide to look for deep signals in the park, please use a dirt towel or some other way to hold the dirt. It is hard to put a deep hole back together and the towel will help.

I am going to try to take advantage of this super mild Winter courtesy of El Niño (I think) and hunt more before the year is up.